The urban development, especially the city evolution and expansion of this last fifty years, is an important topic to focus on. European towns grew densifying city centres, using high-rise buildings and overbuilding. North American cities instead broadened all around downtown areas with low-density buildings, thanks to a large amount of available lands, such as the case-study of Montréal. During the ‘50s and ‘60s the standard of living increased and people wanted to have their own space, not sharing a small apartment in an anonymous block of flats. The number of people using cars to reach the centre increased generating a chronic traffic congestion on streets.
The city of Montréal managed to solve these problems, developing a new “sustainable” way to grow, creating a compact downtown and an underground city network. In my research I analyse the genesis of this new typology of urban development focusing on the main reasons that led to the construction of this network, called Réso.
